Chris Steele-Perkins: Images that defined an era - from teds to the Troubles

When the British-Burmese photographer Chris Steele-Perkins died this week, one of the many to pay tribute to him was the American non-fiction writer Patrick Radden Keefe.

- Lanre Bakare

In particular, it was the images Steele-Perkins took in west Belfast during the Troubles that Keefe was drawn to.

These images, taken during a tour of Northern Ireland in 1978, included a selection from the Divis flats. The notorious republican stronghold was the last place Jean McConville was seen alive before she was executed by the IRA for being an alleged informant.

That murder and its fallout is at the centre of Keefe's book Say Nothing, and after the death of Steele-Perkins he wrote that the photographer's shots of the flats, where the story begins, had been a "huge source of inspiration".

You can see why. Cars are burned out, kids play on a makeshift rope swing and poverty is evident, but often his subjects have smiles on their faces, which add a disarming layer to the story that seems to undermine the official narrative. For a writer, trying to bring the past to life, Steele-Perkins' images were like gold dust.

The photographer, who was born in Burma before moving to Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset as a toddler, spent time with black communities in Wolverhampton, where he was sent for a